Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar.…

An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

The author discusses general semantics in terms of isomorphism, or one-to-one relationships. He claims that language or any part of it cannot be said to be isomorphic. The article is geared to the semantic theoretician. (MS)

Shows how particular features of language are exploited for purpose of humor and reveals the general persuasiveness of incongruity as an element of humor. Features include polysemy, syntactic structures and meaning, deep and surface structure, hyperbole and metaphor, speech patterns, problems of communication, and connectors or linking words. (BK)

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of occupation in school-based occupational therapy practice. The research questions were (1) How do school-based occupational therapists describe the role of occupation during intervention? (2) Which theories of occupation do school-based occupational therapists associate with their own practice?…

Adele Miccio recognized the paucity of information on the phonological development of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and emphasized the need to apply advances in bilingual phonological research toward an appropriate phonological measure for bilingual children. In the spirit of her pioneering work, the present study…

This unique book emphasizes the importance of supporting students' academic development with targeted vocabulary instruction that includes a wide range of language forms and words. The authors provide sound theory and practical techniques to help teachers bridge the achievement gap by strengthening vocabulary, deepening literacy skills, and…

This article deals with current notions of idiomaticity. It argues that lack of adequate empirical study and scholarship has prompted some authors to apply research findings from first language (L1) to second language (L2) contexts without scrutinizing more closely the factors affecting L2 idiom understanding. As a result, certain propositions…

Purpose: A study was conducted that examined factors that lead children who stutter at around age 8 years to persist in the disorder when they reach age 12 years. Method: Seventy-six children were verified to be stuttering at initial assessment. When they reached 12 years of age, they were classified as persistent or recovered. A range of measures…

Drawing on the findings of an ESRC-funded research study, which included a detailed linguistic analysis of a large corpus of writing from secondary English classrooms, this article describes patterns of linguistic deployment at the level of the sentence. Given the limited number of applied linguistic studies which consider writing development in…

In this case study, all parental talk directed to a young child with autism at home over a 3-day period was analyzed for internal state (IS) language, which explicitly focuses upon the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of animate beings. The mother and father used IS terms in 33% and 24% of their utterances, respectively, with sensory and desire…

This study examines verbal behavior in student-teacher talk and alignment of perceptions of communication effectiveness. Heightened awareness of conversational patterns is more productive in the learning environment than the rote use of discourse markers.